Humor, creativity and lexical creation
Humour, créativité et création lexicale
Résumé
Language as a whole is marked by its communicative function and lexicon is part of this function thanks to its denotative referential potentialities. But there is a language skill that goes beyond mere communication, and in which lexicon plays a full role: the ability to play with words in order to exploit their ludic potential and make a humorous use of them. One of the recurrent problems when attempting to define humor lies, however, in the difficulty in drawing its limits, which often leads researchers to define it by default. This issue of Lexis therefore apprehends humor in its wider sense, including, for instance, comedy, irony, satire, parody, sarcasm, to name but a few of its many variations. Within this framework, it aims to approach it via the paradigm of lexical creation, meant as a tool used to provoke laughter.